java soulnation
28.09.2012
color me what??
For those of you who don’t know color me badd, then you must have not grown up in the glorious era of 1990s.
I am not a fan, but after this gig I realised that their songs were actually stuck in my long-term memory space and once they were recalled, they flowed out of my head without haste.
In fact, I was not very enthusiastic to see their performance compared to my friends — but it turned out that I was more “fluent” to sing along..
Brains are strange, sometimes they just pick up information without our permission.
When waiting for their performance, I sort of had expected that they would play those hits that had gone (somehow rather too) popular in Indonesia, like “Close to Heaven” and “I Adore Mi Amor”. I kinda hoped that they would play “All For Love”, a much cheerful song with a colourful video they released in 1991.
Well they did, but unfortunately they sang that song in the very beginning. Then I felt like I had nothing more to expect from the gig..
Of course, in the other hand, it was good to set the vibe, but yes.. I kinda expected to have that song to be sang somewhere in the middle.
But wait.. there was one more song which I vaguely remembered that I really liked back in my primary school years. It turned out that the song was “Choose”, one of my sister’s most favourite songs from the 1990s. I wish she had been there.. She would have had much more fun than I did I guess.
Anyway, to refresh (y)our memories, Color Me Badd is a group from Oklahoma, US, with original members of Bryan Abrams (the bald, cool guy), Mark Calderon (the soft-haired guy who looked like George Michael), Kevin Thornton (the African-American guy who usually wore a cap), and Sam Watters (the curly guy).
After their break up in the late 1990s, Sam (the curly guy) became a record producer and gained his success in the music industry. Perhaps it was his personal success that made him uninterested to rejoin the group..
So here’s the three of them now..
One thing that surprised me was that they were still very energetic. They danced as if they were boybands, as if they hadn’t gained dozens of pounds. And for me that was awesome. And of course they danced in 1990s pop style! Not the oh-so-boring early 2000 R&B style. If you watch the video of “All 4 Love”, then you will get what I mean.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PccRs1HR7VI&w=450]
They even had very synchronised moves during “Choose”. Wow.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp7EjDgBXds&w=450]
But it was not only the crowd who got ‘wow’ed by them, the band was also very surprised to know that the whole crowd can sing “Close to Heaven”. Bryan even said, “you sing much better than we do!”
Oh Bryan, you should’ve thanked P Project for that.. 😛
And for the rest, of course they sang all their hits — “I Wanna Sex You Up”, “The Earth, The Sun, The Rain”, “Time and Chance”, and some more others which I couldn’t remember unfortunately..
Their performance was accompanied by music played by a DJ, who in the beginning played very nostalgic 1990s R&B tunes, including Soul II Soul’s “Back II Life” and Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison”. I really think that the DJ should have had his own slot afterwards — like for an after party or something.
ps: kak eva and bella, whom i went to see the gig with, got a kiss blown by kevin thornton himself. haha.